The 1619 Project in the Classroom and the Historians Who Objected

A curriculum ought to survive a letter from Gordon Wood. This one did not, at least not intact, and the story of why is one of the more instructive episodes in recent American education. It is also one that both sides tend to tell badly: one by pretending the project had no merit, the other by pretending the objections were politics in a tweed jacket.

I want to do something different. I will state the project's strongest case in terms its defenders would accept, then answer it with the record, and then say what teaching slavery honestly looks like, because every parent should want that and nobody should have to choose between truth and pride to get it.

What the project was and how it reached school

In August 2019 The New York Times Magazine published a special issue called the 1619 Project, marking four hundred years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia in 1619. Its lead essay was by Nikole Hannah-Jones, and the issue's stated aim was to "reframe" American history by placing slavery and its legacy at the center of the national story. The Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit that works with the Times, produced classroom materials built on the issue. Teachers in many districts used them, and some districts adopted them formally. Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2020 for her essay, and a book-length version followed in 2021.

Nothing in that is scandalous. Slavery's place in American history is a vast subject, a subject students need to study, and one that school textbooks have sometimes handled with embarrassing brevity. The issue contained serious work. The trouble came with specific claims, and above all with one claim about the Revolution.

The strongest case for the project

Fairness requires the best version of the opposing argument. Here it is.

One. Slavery was not a side issue. By 1776 it was legal in all thirteen colonies, and enslaved people made up a large share of the population in the South. The wealth of the plantation economy, tobacco, rice and indigo, tied Atlantic trade to the institution.

Two. The Constitution of 1787 accommodated slavery in its text. It counted three-fifths of "all other persons" for apportionment in Article I, Section 2. It barred Congress from ending the importation of slaves before 1808 in Article I, Section 9. And it required the return of fugitives in Article IV, Section 2, without using the word slavery. Those clauses are real, and any history that skips them is a bad one.

Three. Some enslavers did worry about British interference with slavery. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation offering freedom to enslaved people who left rebel masters and joined the British. Planters noticed. And in 1772 the English case of Somerset v. Stewart, in which Lord Mansfield held that slavery could exist only through positive law and that a master could not forcibly send an enslaved man out of England, is sometimes cited as a sign of where the empire might be heading.

Four. Black Americans have fought for the promise of the founding ever since, and a school that fails to teach their part in the story has failed its students.

Those are the best points. Points one, two and four are true and belong in every classroom. The question is whether they lead to the claim the lead essay actually made.

The claim that drew the letter

The essay said that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery." That is a claim about causation, about why a revolution happened, and it is a claim about the motives of the people who made it. A historian can test such a claim against the documents.

In December 2019, five historians wrote to the Times: Gordon Wood of Brown University, whose book on the American Revolution won a Pulitzer; James McPherson of Princeton, the great historian of the Civil War; Sean Wilentz of Princeton; Victoria Bynum of Texas State University; and James Oakes of the City University of New York. None of them is a conservative polemicist. Several of them are on the political left. Their letter asked the Times to correct what they called "factual errors," and the claim about the Revolution was among the points they challenged.

The Times Magazine's editor defended the project in a published reply. Then, in March 2020, the claim changed. The online text of the essay was revised to say "one of the primary reasons some of the colonists" declared independence, with the qualifying words added. That revision is public, and a reader can compare the two versions.

The answer, in numbered points

Here is why the original claim does not survive contact with the record.

1. Dunmore cuts the other way on the cause. His proclamation came in November 1775, well after Lexington and Concord, after Bunker Hill and after the colonies had been in open conflict with the Crown for months. It was a reaction to a rebellion already underway. It cannot have been the reason the rebellion started.

1. Somerset did not apply to the colonies. Mansfield's 1772 ruling was narrow: it held that an enslaved man could not be forcibly removed from England. It did not abolish slavery in the empire, and the British Empire kept the institution in its Caribbean colonies until the 1830s. A Virginia planter who read about it would have found little to fear.

1. The grievances are in the documents. The Declaration lists the colonists' complaints against George III. They are about taxation without representation, quartering troops, dissolving legislatures, trade restrictions and the denial of trial by jury. Those are what pamphlets, letters and sermons of the 1760s and 1770s are about. If protecting slavery was the primary motive, it was a well-kept secret.

1. The Declaration's own text is the problem for the thesis. It says "all men are created equal." Jefferson, himself an enslaver, wrote a passage in his draft condemning the king for the slave trade, and the Continental Congress struck it. That is a real and uncomfortable fact, and it is also evidence that the word slavery was on the table. It was on the table as a moral stain on the British crown, not as a reason to leave it.

1. The Founders were not of one mind, and many of them moved against slavery. Vermont's constitution of 1777 prohibited it. Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition act in 1780. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned it in the territory north of the Ohio River, and Congress re-enacted that ban in 1789. In 1807 Congress voted to end the Atlantic slave trade as of 1808, the first moment the Constitution allowed. A conspiracy to protect slavery that ended it in some states, banned it in the Northwest Territory and banned the trade at the first chance is an odd conspiracy.

1. The antislavery argument was built from the Founding. This is the point the original claim missed. Frederick Douglass, in his 1852 Rochester oration on the Fourth of July, stood in the shadow of the founders' hypocrisy and called their principles the saving ones. In the 1850s he argued that the Constitution, rightly read, was an antislavery document. Abraham Lincoln built the case against slavery's expansion on the Declaration, from his 1854 Peoria speech through the Gettysburg Address, which says the nation was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." If the Founding was a slaveholders' plot, why did Douglass and Lincoln use it as their weapon?

None of that makes the founders saints. It makes them the authors of a promise they did not fully keep, and that is the account Douglass and Lincoln gave. See Frederick Douglass's Plea for Free Speech in Boston, Read Passage by Passage for Douglass on principle, and The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 Banned Slavery and Promised Schools for the ordinance that did what the project's thesis cannot account for.

Where the objection is fair to the project

I would be unfair if I stopped there, so let me concede what should be conceded.

The historians who wrote the letter did not say slavery was marginal. They said the specific claim was wrong, and they said so as defenders of a history that puts slavery at the center of the story. McPherson and Oakes have both spent careers on it. Oakes's work on the antislavery politics of Lincoln's era is a monument to the proposition that slavery drove the nation's central conflict. The disagreement was about causation in 1776, not about whether students should study slavery.

And the project did prompt a wider look at neglected corners of the record: the economics of cotton, the experience of enslaved families, the long fight for civil rights after emancipation. A school that uses the issue as one source, with the historians' letter beside it, is doing what a good history class should: teaching students to weigh evidence from sources that disagree.

That is the heart of the matter. The problem was never that students read the project. The problem was a curriculum that carried a disputed claim into classrooms as settled fact, in a country where students deserve to learn that historians argue.

A word about how a thesis gets tested

Let me spend a minute on method, because the dispute is really about method. A historian who claims that X caused Y has to find the documents in which the people of the time say so. For the Revolution those documents are plentiful: the resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, the pamphlets of the 1760s, the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress in 1774, the Declaration itself. Read them in order and you find an argument about the rights of Englishmen, about Parliament's power to tax people who had no vote in it, and about what a king owes his subjects. Slavery appears, as it does throughout the period, as a contradiction that some of the writers noticed and a few of them agonised over. It does not appear as the secret engine under the hood.

Now, a thesis can still be true without the participants announcing it. Historians are allowed to argue that people had motives they did not state. But the burden for that kind of claim is heavy, and the evidence has to be of a kind that would be recognised by scholars who disagree with you. That was the thrust of the five signers' complaint. They were not saying the topic was off limits. They were saying the proof was missing, which in the history business is a more devastating objection than being offensive.

There is a small comic irony here that I cannot resist. A project that told readers to look harder at the founding generation's hypocrisies was undone, in part, by the founding generation's habit of writing everything down. They were an enormously chatty bunch. If protecting slavery was the great unspoken reason for independence, it was unspoken by men who could not pass a tavern without publishing a pamphlet about it.

What honest teaching of slavery looks like

I would hold a classroom to six standards.

1. Teach the institution in full. The Middle Passage, the plantation economy, the domestic slave trade, family separation, the laws that made the system, the resistance of the enslaved and the experience of free Black Americans. Do not soften it.
2. Teach the Constitution's compromises by their text. Have students read the three clauses named above and ask what each meant. Then have them read Article I, Section 9's 1808 clause, and ask why the framers chose that date and what Congress did when it arrived.
3. Teach the antislavery tradition as American. Douglass, Lincoln, the abolitionists, the Black soldiers who fought for the Union, the framers of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. A story in which Americans only defended slavery and never fought it is not true.
4. Teach causation carefully. A good teacher asks, "What do the sources say about why the colonists rebelled?" and has students look at the primary documents, not at a summary of someone's interpretation.
5. Put competing historians in the room. A teacher who assigns the project should assign the December 2019 letter and the reply. A teacher who assigns Wood should also assign critics of Wood. Students who read both learn what historical argument is.
6. Let parents see the materials. The easiest way to settle a dispute over a curriculum is to publish it. See Curriculum Transparency Laws, What They Require and Why They Help Teachers for how that works, and How to Request Records From Your School District and Actually Get Them if your district has not.

The coverage and the lesson

I will add one note on the coverage, because it is part of the story. The controversy was often reported as a fight between "historians" and "conservatives," as if the five signers had come from a think tank. They had not. They were among the most distinguished scholars of the period, and several were people the Times itself had treated as authorities for decades. A press that wanted to understand the dispute could have started by reading the letter.

The larger lesson is about institutions. When a prestigious paper publishes a bold thesis and a school system adopts it within months, the speed is the problem. Historical claims earn their place in a curriculum by surviving years of review, of reading, of rebuttal. A project that moves from magazine to classroom in the time it takes to print a lesson plan has skipped the step that gives the claim its authority.

And the lesson for parents is encouraging. You do not need to be a historian to ask what a unit claims and what its sources are. You need the syllabus, the reading list and the habit of asking. Madison wrote that a people who mean to govern themselves must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. That includes knowledge of how your own children are being taught. See Madison's 1822 Letter on Why a Republic Needs Informed Citizens.

The case in brief

1. The 1619 Project was a serious attempt to put slavery at the center of American history, and much of its subject matter belongs in every classroom.
2. Its lead essay claimed that protecting slavery was a primary reason for the Revolution, and five leading historians, Gordon Wood, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes, wrote in December 2019 that this was wrong.
3. In March 2020 the claim was revised to say "some of the colonists," an acknowledgment that the original was too broad.
4. The record supports the historians: Dunmore's proclamation came after the fighting began, Somerset did not reach the colonies, the Declaration's grievances are about other things, and the Founding was the tool Douglass and Lincoln used against slavery.
5. Honest teaching presents slavery in full, shows the Constitution's compromises by their text, treats the antislavery tradition as American and puts competing historians in the room.

What you can do: ask your child's teacher for the reading list in any unit on slavery or the Revolution, and check whether it includes more than one historian's view.